Joe Biden, The Media's Secret Quayle

Hidden just below the surface of the liberal media is a barely noticed
trend of patronizing contempt: Joe Biden is the Democrats' Dan Quayle,
but because he is a Democrat they'll do anything to avoid treating him
like they treated Dan Quayle.

The Washington Post trumpeted a new poll recently that showed Hillary
Clinton was cleaning Biden's clock in an early poll among Democrats, 73
percent to 12. The Post saw that as great news for Hillary, but not as
disastrous news for the man who's currently in his second term as vice
president. Try to imagine Al Gore pulling 12 percent in a presidential
poll during Clinton's second term.

Politically,
Biden is a Joke Man Walking. But shhh, we're not supposed to notice. It
might make the president who selected him look bad.

Biden's unleashed some jaw-dropping gaffes that the networks have
skipped. In 2008, he bashed his friend McCain: "John's last-minute
economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the
middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word:
jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs."

Katie Couric earned a "Cronkite Award" for shoving Sarah Palin around
in 2008, but a few days earlier she threw softball questions at Biden --
and Biden still managed to mangle history: "When the stock market
crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just
talk about the, you know, the princes of greed." Roosevelt wasn't
president in 1929, and there was no television. But Couric didn't
correct him, and ABC ignored it. NBC noticed, briefly.

Now take Biden's latest gaffe about New York City. Hong Kong's airport
is shiny and new, he reported. "But if I blindfolded you and took you to
LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think, 'I must be in some Third
World country.' I'm not joking," he said. New York mayor Bill de Blasio
called it "inappropriate," saying Biden's speech was "not the right way
to talk about it."

If a Republican had said this, it would be declared a racial slur and
there would be hell to pay. But Biden is Biden, and gets another
mulligan. The New York Times helpfully wrote a story headlined "Some See
Biden's 'Third World' Description of La Guardia as Too Kind." Time
magazine explained de Blasio's ties to Hillary Clinton, "for whom he
worked as Senate campaign manager in 2000, could be coloring de Blasio's
strong rebuke of Biden."

In December, Biden upset feminists while talking to female employees at
an internet company in Japan. Biden was scheduled to address the
company's female employees and "discuss the economic impact of women in
the corporate world." Instead, while talking to the women, he blurted,
"Do your husbands like you working full time?" Network coverage? Zero.

"CBS This Morning" covered the Biden Asia trip for four days in a row,
but never found time for that clip. If a Republican like Rick Santorum
had said it, it would have been painted as a dark male chauvinist
moment.

The most recent proof of the media's disinterest in Biden's outrages
came in a February 7 interview on CNN's "New Day." Anchor Kate Bolduan
displayed her servility to the Democrats from the opening chatter about
how much Biden loves Amtrak trains. Her first question asked about what
he hopes to achieve as the leader of a new presidential task force on
job training.

Riveting, CNN, just riveting.

The so-called "worldwide leader" in news couldn't muster a single
question about the ongoing failures of Obamacare, the IRS harassment of
conservative groups, the muddle of Afghanistan, or the fiasco in
Benghazi. Instead, Bolduan pestered Biden about when he would announce
whether he would run for president and whether his wife would approve,
with zero mention of his very weak polls. Before that, she wondered "Can
I ask you one fun question about Corvettes?"

This was Bolduan's toughest question: "What do you say to your fellow
Senate Democrats who have made it pretty clear that they don't want the
President anywhere near their state this election cycle? And you
jokingly kind of said, okay, I'll stay out of it. But what do you say to
them?" Biden replied "I know I've been invited to go into well over 128
races so far. And so there's some places the President is considerably
more popular than I am."

Even here, some so-called reporters seemed more like press secretaries
than reporters. Shira T. Center at the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call
helpfully guessed that CNN had provided this hot scoop: "Biden Boasts
Democrats Want Him to Campaign for Them."

Joe Biden is a national embarrassment, so much so that even with the
national media doing their best to cover up, still the never-ending
gaffes make their way out to John Q. Public, who will never vote him
into any national office ever again.

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